


Contrapasso

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fatherhood, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Implied/referenced infant death, Internal Conflict
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 14:44:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12937497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: This is the price he pays for his sins, the universe’s way of restoring equilibrium. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth.Son for a son.(Set post 4x08)





	1. Down Corridors, Through Automatic Doors

**Author's Note:**

> The chapter titles for this fic will all come from the song [Wires](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmm7TmvxrQw) by the band Athlete, which is pretty much the soundtrack for this entire fic.... and fits it too ridiculously scarily well. So give that a listen if you're so inclined.
> 
> This kinda just ignores some parts of canon (the drugs, Laurel's dad), but that was intentional since it's meant to be more introspective and angsty than plot-driven.This will probs run for about 3 chapters. I can see it maybe possibly running into a fourth if I really get going, but that depends. For now..... ENJOY.

All the color goes out of the world the first time he sees him.

It’s like a rush of greyscale sweeping across his field of vision, bleeding out everything around him and leaving only one tiny drop of technicolor behind; the focal point of his universe, the only thing he can see. He follows it like a Wiseman to a star, to this twisted, hellish version of a manger. The world is all black and white and sickly shades of grey, and he’s the only color left, lying there in a sterile plastic box, barely visible beneath the mess of wires and machines and tubes around him, on him, in him.

 _Him_. His son.

Frank knows the instant he sees him, doesn’t need any damn paternity test to tell him what he can feel in his bones, as far down as his marrow. It’s like a sucker punch to the gut and a bullet to the brain and a knife stabbed straight through his heart all at once, just looking at him lying there, so small he hardly even looks real, limbs fragile and almost rubbery, tissue paper-thin.

Not like they should be. None of this is like it should be.

He wants to weep. Collapse. Beat his fists bloody against the wall. Yet all he can do is stare, as numbed and horrified as he is awed, because this is him, his son, _their_ son, the tiny moving mass in Laurel’s stomach in the flesh. He forgets how to breathe altogether, when he lays eyes on him; the moment his son came into this world he stole his breath for himself, holding it hostage in his lungs. Stole his heart, too, and he won’t ever give it back, because this is _him_ , this tiny child he’d had a hand in creating, and it defies all sense, all logic. He leeches all the color out of the world and rewrites the laws of gravity and scrambles every star in the Milky Way with every breath he takes, every second he lies there. The simple fact of his existence is an improbability.

Frank has never believed in miracles. But he knows one when he sees one.

Only this isn’t one.

Because then, then the rest of the world comes crashing back in cruelly; the wires, the ventilator, the tubes. The staccato beeping of machines around him and the faint, sinister, too-clean smell of antiseptic. The walls are so white they glow. The world here feels surreal, almost like what he’d imagined purgatory must be. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe they both are.

The nurse’s voice, then. Soft. Lilting. “There he is. Bet he’s happy to see you.”

The baby isn’t seeing much of anything and they both know it, his eyes closed in something of a fitful slumber. His skin is wrinkled, mottled red and pink. He’s just _small_ , as tiny as a doll – three pounds two ounces, they’d told them; small enough Frank imagines he could cradle him in his palms with hardly any trouble at all. He’s never seen anything so tiny and beautiful and perfect, and yet all he wants to do, right then, is be sick, as horrified by the sight of him lying there as he is spellbound. He keeps it at bay somehow, though, chokes down the screams that rise along with bile in this throat, and manages to open his mouth to speak with at least marginal composure.

“What’s that-” His voice catches. “What’s that down his throat?”

“We have him on a ventilator, to help him breathe,” the woman explains, and she’s faceless, formless, nothing more than a voice to him right then. He can’t even see her. “His lungs were underdeveloped, but-”

“What if he cries?” he cuts her off. “It won’t – that won’t hurt him, or-”

He feels stupid. It feels like a stupid question – that of all the things he has to be concerned about he should be concerned about _that_ – but she isn’t looking at him like it is. The woman just gives a placid smile as they come to a stop in front of the incubator.

“It won’t hurt him. I can’t imagine it’s fun, but it isn’t hurting him. If things go well we can get him off of it soon, get him breathing on his own, but for now it’s what’s best.”

 _If things go well._ Cautious optimism, at best. They both know there are so many reasons they might not. So many things that’ve gone horribly wrong already.

Frank bats away those thoughts before they can descend, sinks numbly into the chair beside the incubator, going down as hard as a lead weight. His limbs are full of pins and needles, useless, clumsy, his tongue just as much so. The woman, sensing that he has no else to say, gives another smile, dismissing herself.

“I’ll give you some time alone with him. Let us know if you need anything.”

He doesn’t hear her go, or give the words any kind of acknowledgement. All he can do is stare, struck speechless, immobilized – because he’s happy, fuck, he’s so happy, the kind of happiness he’d thought he would never get to feel, would never deserve to feel. He has a son. He has a _son_. He wants to run outside, scream it into the heavens. It doesn’t feel real, and yet-

He has a son, and behind this plastic dome, on this little bed, he’s barely alive. He has a machine breathing for him, a tube pumping food into his stomach, an IV keeping him hydrated and all other manner of wires monitoring his vitals, his breathing, his body temperature, waiting for the second one falls out of line and the rest follow like dominos. It’s all terrifyingly fragile, his hold on life so tenuous already.

He has a son. This is his _son_. But fucking hell, he’d give anything, give his own _life_ for things not to be this way.

He almost died. Laurel almost died with him, bleeding out in an elevator with no one to come to her aid until it was nearly too late. He came so close to losing them both and the thought hardens his stomach into an ice-cold pit; he can’t think about that, contemplate what-if’s, because if he does he’ll panic, shut down, and he won’t be of any use to Laurel that way. He has to focus on _right now_ , what’s right here in front of him.

His son.

The words hit him again, his insides tying themselves into knots. _His_. Somehow it’d felt like both an entirely real and distant possibility that the baby could be his after all. He’d told himself and Laurel it wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t, and that’d been the truth – but the fact that he is. He _is_ his son. That _does_ matter. He presses his hand to the plastic separating them, wanting to say something, introduce himself, but he can’t muster his voice. He can’t find the words. Not like he’d hear them anyway.

He doesn’t deserve this. Him. Once it comes, the thought circles relentlessly. It’s as if right then he can see the blood on his hands, the physical embodiment of his crimes, thick and sticky and smeared where he’s laid his palm against the plastic. Annalise. Annalise’s son.

Annalise saved his son. It’s sheer poetic injustice. And yet he’s so grateful he wants to fall down at her feet and weep.

 _Saved_. Maybe that’s too optimistic; they’re so far from out of the woods Frank can’t even see the sun through the trees. But hope is all he has; hope, in this plastic box, and hope in the stuttering rise and fall of his baby son’s chest, and hope in a bed in the maternity wing upstairs where Laurel waits for him, weak from blood loss and unable to visit herself. Annalise gave him all those things. She gave him everything when he took everything from her, and there’s no possible way he can repay that debt. That blood debt.

And maybe this isn’t more than he deserves. Maybe this – his son, barely alive, barely breathing – is precisely what he deserves.

Maybe this is how he pays.

It’s irrational, he knows. It’s fucking selfish, really, to think of this as some sort of retribution for his crimes, the lives he’s taken – when this isn’t about him, his _karma_ , not even remotely. How dare he even think about himself at all, when Laurel almost died alone and screaming and their son with her. He doesn’t get to do that. He’s a selfish piece of shit if he does, yet the thought slips in and out regardless, and he can’t ward it off, either.

When he finally finds his voice, it scrapes his throat like a stone, soft and broken. It’s possible this is irrational too; the baby can’t hear him, sure as hell can’t understand anything he’s saying, but he can’t stand this silence. He has to talk to him.

He has to try.

“Hey,” Frank starts, clearing his throat. He wants to reach through one of the holes, take his hand, but he’s terrified of jostling something out of place, frightening him. Hurting him. “Hey, I, uh… it’s me, buddy. Your dad. I-”

His voice falters. _Speak. Speak, you fucking idiot, you can’t do anything else for him. This is all you can do._

“I know you never heard my voice before. I’m sorry. I wish… wish you coulda. Maybe we woulda had time, but you came earlier than we thought. Fashionably early, right? Just… couldn’t wait to get out here and see the world.” He tries to make himself smile. “You’re okay, though. You’re gonna be okay.” Lie. It’s a lie, the worst one he’s ever told, and yet if he keeps telling it, over and over, maybe he can get at least one of them to believe it. “Just breathe. Keep breathin’. That’s… that’s all you gotta do, okay? Just keep on breathin’ for me.”

He’s making it sound easy. Like his lungs don’t only half-work. Like he wasn’t born in a tide of blood, torn from Laurel and given such a violent introduction to the world. Like he’s _fine_. And he will be. Has to be. This is his entire world curled up before him, all his todays, all his yesterdays, all his tomorrows and everything in between. He had no life before this moment. Before him, there was nothing.

After him-

No. He can’t let himself think it. Thinking it will make it real, draw the possibility out into the world, and it _isn’t_ possible. He’s stable. He’s breathing. That’s it. Those are the only things that matter.

_We’re not sure how many minutes passed before he was revived. There might be damage to his brain from the lack of oxygen. We won’t know for sure until we have him stable enough to run some tests, but-_

Fuck that.

Fuck the doctors. All of them. Fuck their measured smiles and cautious optimism and carefully-cultivated bedside manners. They don’t know shit and they don’t know his son, Laurel’s son – because _he_ may be weak, God knows he’s always been weak, but Laurel… Laurel is a fighter, in every sense of the word. Laurel is stronger than anyone he’s ever known, strength plated across her skin, flowing through her blood, the strength of the army that is her, and she’s given it to their son, he knows it. He wouldn’t have made it this far if she hadn’t.

The worst is over. But by now he should know better than to believe that.

The worst is never over. Not for them.

 

~

 

He finds her the way she was when he left her: lying in bed, eyes slipping in and out of focus, body longing for rest but mind refusing to grant it to her.

They had to sedate her, before. Before they’d known where the baby was, when she’d woken up screaming, hysterical, hands clutching at her stomach and finding the familiar swell gone. _Screaming_. She wouldn’t stop. She’d tried to rip her IV out and run, clawed at him when he’d tried to stop her. She wouldn’t stop screaming. In the silence, Frank swears he can still hear the echoes of her screams down the halls.

 _Where’s the baby? Tell me… tell me where the baby is, where is he,_ where is he _-_

Calm, now. Everything is calm and still in the quiet of the aftermath, and her eyes track him as he approaches; more alert, now, but still hazy. She struggles to sit up, at first, and he goes to help her but before he can get a word out she’s leaning in, leaning towards him as if to grab his shirt, desperate.

“How is he?” she breathes, gaunt beneath the fluorescent lights. “Did you see him?”

“Yeah.” He nods, numbly. Dumbly. He can’t seem to do anything else. “Yeah, I saw ‘im.”

She stops breathing. “What’d… what’d he look like – was he okay?”

He’s exhausted, burned out and frayed and barely capable of coherent thought, let alone coherent speech, but he can’t collapse, now, can’t break when Laurel needs him to be strong. One of them has to be and he’s so used to it being her, and now he’s her Atlas. Now he carries the weight of the world for both of them.

All three of them.

He sinks down into the chair beside her bed, rubbing at his eyes. “They got him in an incubator. All… hooked up to tubes. Ventilator, helpin’ him breathe. They didn’t…” He sniffs and rubs a hand over his beard, keeping his eyes lowered. “They didn’t tell me anything new. I don’t know. Just that he’s stable. And he’s-” His voice breaks. He swallows, forces himself to steady it and reaches for her hand where it rests on the sheets, taking it in both of his. “He’s so small. Crazy small, small like you never seen. Perfect. He’s… he’s ours, he’s fuckin’ perfect, Laurel.”

“He’s yours,” she murmurs, and it’s a statement, not a question; no dismay, no disappointment. A mere statement of fact.

If Frank could, he’d laugh right then. He hadn’t known he was going to be a father until the day his son was born; he’s so completely, wildly unprepared it’s almost comical. They both are.

“Yeah,” he says, voice thick, and nods. He swipes at his cheeks; he’s been crying since leaving the NICU, hadn’t even realized it until now. He presses a kiss to her hand, clutching it tight. “He’s ours.”

Silence settles over them, only it’s never truly silence here, and they listen to the sounds of footsteps in the hallway and muffled voices next door and the familiar symphony of their breathing without a word. He keeps his lips pressed to the back of her hand, as if he’s afraid she’ll slip away the second he lets go, and after a while she reaches out, tracing the outline of his face with one finger. Like he’s a penitent come to kneel before her altar, receive her mercy.

He didn’t know he could love her this much. Didn’t know he could love her more than he already did – but he does; he can feel the weight of it in his chest, expanding out and up until his ribs don’t feel like enough to contain it, like it might split open his chest and bleed out of him. She’s given him everything, given him his entire world, defied everything and everyone over and over to do it. There’s no way he can ever find the words to thank her, and so he kisses her hand again, then each of her fingers, desperate and shaking and tethered only by her.

“He’s gonna be okay,” he mutters, after seconds or minutes or hours have gone by. Time no longer has meaning since their son came, passing somehow both impossibly fast and glacially slow. “I know it. Saw it in ‘im. He’s strong. He’s a fighter. Like you.” He sniffs. His voice is low, full of quiet, unshakable conviction. “He’s strong, I know he is. I don’t know why this happened, but it don’t matter. It don’t matter, ‘cause he’s ours and he’s gonna be okay.”

Something changes in the air, then. There’s a weight to it, like a wall slamming down between them. Laurel lowers her eyes, drawing her hand away from him all at once and laying it on top of her stomach; now mostly flat, empty, the space where their son should still rest. All of a sudden she won’t look at him, and he frowns.

“Hey,” he says, soft, pressing. “What’s wrong?”

Laurel swallows. “Nothing.”

“’S not nothing, what’s wrong?”

Laurel hesitates, again, seems reluctant to open her mouth, but after a moment she does, finally. “You and Connor. In the apartment, when I was trying to pull you off him… you hit-” She swallows, shakes her head. His throat twists shut in horror. “You hit… my stomach, and it was an accident – and I don’t know if that was what caused it, maybe it wasn’t. I didn’t tell anyone, go to the doctor. Maybe if I had-”

She’s still talking. But suddenly he can’t hear her, anymore.

It all comes flooding back in flashes. Nightmarish, splintered fragments of memory. Voices. Yelling. Laurel’s hands on his arm. _His_ hands around Connor’s neck. All he’d seen was red. Him letting go, finally. Arms swinging down. Elbow connecting with something – hard.

Laurel, after. One hand holding her stomach, other on his shoulder.

 _No_.

“Frank? _Frank_.”

Another voice, now. Present day. Laurel’s hand has found it’s way to his forearm and she’s grasping it with a frown, trying to call him back to earth – and he doesn’t mean to but all at once he draws his arm away as if he’s been burned, recoiling from her touch.

She wilts. “Frank… it’s not – I don’t want you to blame yourself, it-”

“I should go,” he grunts, suddenly, and rises to stand, backing away. “Go be with him. I’ll… I’ll go.”

“Frank-”

“I should go. I’ll be back,” is all he can say. An excuse. The coward’s way out. Fucking coward – that’s what he is, what he always has been. He feels his throat tighten as he goes for the door, pausing only long enough to repeat, “I’ll go be with him.”

 

~

 

Except he doesn’t.

Except he can’t, suddenly.

He ambles his way back down to the NICU with absolutely every intention of going inside, but when he reaches the door he finds, all at once, that he can’t make himself go one step further, cross the threshold. He tries, over and over. He stalls, pacing the hallways, trying to build up the courage – and still. Still, he can’t.

He ends up collapsing into a chair in the hallway just outside the door, running his hands over his face without any recollection of how he got there. He shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be anywhere _near_ him. He’d tried to be good, for her, for the baby, make something of his sorry, worthless life. Be good. That was all he’d wanted. It was simple – or it was supposed to be, at least. He’d only wanted that _one_ thing. Two things. Her. The baby. It didn’t matter if her son was his or not; it never had. He would be there anyway.

Two things. That was all he’d wanted. And he’d fucked it up, because he fucks everything up, useless, pathetic, sorry fucking son of a bitch that he is. It hits him, all at once; that same feeling of dark, suffocating worthlessness he’d felt that night at Annalise’s, a gun to his head and his finger on the trigger.

_What's taking you so long, huh?_

_Pull it! Do it!_

He should have. Should have blown his brains out and ended things while he had the chance. It would’ve been like putting down a rabid dog, sick beyond curing; able only to hurt, infect, spread its disease. It would’ve been for the best, and Laurel might have mourned for a while but she would’ve moved on. Their son never would have known him. Ultimately, he would’ve been doing both of them a favor. All at once he can feel the corruption and death buried in his bones like cancer, rotting him from the inside, because he was a fucking idiot to think he could try to be good, move on, make a family with Laurel. Be _happy_. Like he deserves that.

All he does is destroy. It isn’t about trying to be good. It isn’t about trying at all; he’s bad, soiled to the core, and _try_ is a nonfactor in this equation. The outcome is the same regardless. He hurts people.

It’s all he can do. Hurt. Destroy. Ruin.

_That's all you'll ever be. Sick and depraved._

Annalise was right. She always is. He can’t hold his son with these hands, these violent, blood-soaked hands; he’s already hurt him, nearly killed him, Laurel, too. Both of them. He feels his stomach lurch at the thought. _Accident_ , she’d said, but fuck that – there are no accidents. This was meant to happen.

Maybe it was. Maybe he was meant to lose his son and be the reason why. Eye for an eye. He might as well have taken a knife to Laurel’s stomach, wrapped his hands around her throat like he did to Lila, and disgust slithers down his spine at the thought, shuddering its way through him. He’s dimly aware of the feeling of tears on his cheeks, his throat a useless knot, his limbs heavy and cold. He feels like he’s drowning, the weight of his sins pressing down on his chest, filling his lungs. Filling them with blood.

Someone settles into the chair next to him. And that’s when he looks up.

And then, there she is.

At first he’s certain he’s hallucinating, drawing memories from the past out into reality, sick with exhaustion and self-loathing – but Annalise Keating isn’t saying anything, ordering him to pull the trigger. She’s just sitting there looking at him evenly, with something in the realm of condescending impatience, as though to ask if he’s _done yet_. Like a child throwing a tantrum with its mother standing by, waiting for it to pass.

He has no idea why she’s still here, but she is; Annalise Keating is a force of nature, like gravity, always present in one form or another. Frank looks sideways at her through his tears, and he sees an angel. And he sees a devil.

 _Speak of the devil and she shall appear_. Maybe she’d been summoned somehow by thought alone. Conjured.

He scrubs at his cheeks, still not entirely convinced she’s real. “Annalise…”

“He’s yours,” is all she says, flatly, and only when she speaks is he sure she’s real. There’s no animus in her tone, no venom. More than anything, she sounds as tired as he feels.

Frank exhales. “Don’t… look, don’t blame Laurel; she was scared, and she didn’t know, and… so she told everyone-”

“I don’t care,” Annalise cuts him off. She gives a long-suffering sigh. “It doesn’t matter now.”

He feels guilty. Almost like he’s taken something from her, another son; this time Wes’s son, a replacement for the replacement for the son she’d lost. He doesn’t dwell on it long. But the thought does come.

A pause. The silence feels liable to smother him, so thick he can hardly move in it. Somehow, by some miracle, he pulls himself together, because the last thing he wants is to be a pathetic, sniveling son of a bitch, crying like a child in front of her, acting like he’s lost something when she’s lost everything. When _he’s_ the one who took it from her.

No, he doesn’t get to cry. His pain isn’t even a drop in the ocean of hers.

“You-” He chokes out. “You saved ‘im. The doctors said he woulda died if you hadn’t…” Words fail him, and he clears his throat, looking back down at his hands, at the hangnails he’s picked raw and bloody. “You saved him.”

He wonders if she wishes she hadn’t, now, if only to make him feel the same pain he’d caused her, but she isn’t indicating that she wishes that at all; Annalise may be coldhearted, but she’d never wish death on an innocent, he knows. Not even his son.

“Thank you,” he says, and the words sound weak. They can’t express his gratitude. They’re so, so far from enough. “Thank you, Annalise, I-”

“Don’t.”

His mouth snaps shut. There’s so much he wants to say, so much he could speak for hours, but it’s nothing Annalise wants to hear and they both know that. Talking won’t change things. It won’t do shit.

He’s so certain she’s not going to say anything else that he startles when she speaks, again with that low, sardonic drawl. “What’re you doing out here anyway? Go be with him.”

“I-” He clenches his jaw. “I can’t.”

She scowls, finally looking over at him. “What the hell do you mean you _can’t_?”

“It was my fault. Him comin’ early. Walsh and I-” He pauses. “We got into a fight. Stupid. It was… it was so stupid. She was tryin’ to pull me off him. When I let go I hit-” Frank pauses to swallow, force this throat back open. “I hit her. I didn’t even notice. She didn’t say anything.” He sucks down a breath. “I hurt her. And I hurt him. I can’t… go in there, I – I shouldn’t be any fuckin’ where near him.”

Something like a sob rattles through him. He can feel his face aflame, with shame and guilt and hot tears, and he feels exactly like the child he knows she sees him as, right then.

Run. He has to run. Far away, like he had before; he should’ve stayed gone, never come back. Suddenly the hospital walls are choking the air out of him, closing in, and he finds himself rising to his feet frantically, unable to sit still.

“I should-” Annalise’s stare is still even, perfectly level. He feels himself shrink further beneath it. “I should leave. Leave ‘em. They’re better off. And I can’t – I can’t be a dad, I’ll just fuck him up. Hurt him. That’s all I do. Hurt people.” He can’t breathe. He can feel a panic attack hurtling toward him, huge and looming. “I’ll just hurt him again. I’ll… I’m gonna hurt him. I already did.”

It’s an inevitability. He isn’t sure how anyone could regard it as anything but. One way or another, he’ll hurt his son again; by accident, inadvertently, with his actions or his words or some combination of the two, or with this inextricable curse hovering over him. Maybe, Frank thinks, if he leaves now he can spare him any further harm, keep him out of the crossfire of his sins. He’s something good. He’s so _good_ ; innocent in a way that feels incomprehensible, otherworldly. He deserves so much better than to be collateral damage in his shitshow of an existence.

He can do this for their son. For Laurel. He can leave while they still have a chance, leave and never look back. It’s the only good thing he can do for them now.

But Annalise’s voice stops him before he can take even one step toward the exit.

“How _dare_ you.”

Not a question. It begs no answer. He freezes in his path even though he wants nothing more than to keep going, and turns to find that she’s risen from her chair too, jaw tight, eyes burning, churning dark with anger. She’s like an oncoming storm; a lioness provoked. He knows her well enough to know Annalise only looks like this when she’s truly _furious_.

He deflates, bracing himself. “Annalise-”

“How dare you even _think_ about leaving your son when you took mine away from me. I would do anything in the world to have my baby back – and you’re just going to leave? Throw your son away like he’s trash, like he doesn’t matter to you?”

“It’s better,” he tries to protest. “Better for him, for both of ‘em-”

“Better?” Annalise chews the word like it tastes foul. “Better is leaving your son without a father? And Laurel? What about her – you’re going to leave her again too? I found her lying in a pool of her own blood in that elevator. I can’t even _begin_ to imagine how scared and alone she felt. If you leave her now, you’re going to destroy her. You’re an ungrateful, selfish son of a bitch, Frank, you’re only thinking of yourself-”

“How can you think I should even have a kid?” he shoots back, voice thick as she advances on him. “After what I did? Everything I’ve done-”

“Maybe you shouldn’t. God knows and _I_ know you don’t deserve to. But you do, now. And this is not about you, do you understand me? This is not about what you did to my son, your karma. Divine retribution or whatever the hell you wanna call it. That child in there is not your penance. Not your punishment. He is your _son_ , and if he dies you stay with him until he takes his last breath, because _that_ is what a parent does. That is what I had to do.” Her voice is strained, all at once. She’s crying, he notices, unshed tears shimmering in her eyes, seeping out of the cracks in her anger. When she speaks again her voice is a low, hoarse whisper. “That is what I had to do and so help me God, you better do it too.”

He crumples, before her. He feels like a child, as dumb as a child, and all he can manage to do is gulp, give something like a nod and lower his eyes. He knows she’s right. She always is.

She lost her son. Had him ripped from her before he could take his first breath. When she held him in her arms for the first time, all she held was his lifeless body. She had no choice in that scenario – and now, him choosing to leave, give up his son willingly… The utter selfishness of it all comes crashing down on him.

She’s right. And so with another nod Frank turns, and he makes his way back into the NICU, leaving her without a word.

He finds the incubator easily, though again he has no idea how he manages to navigate there; he’s drawn to him with some internal compass, it seems, locked in on his true north. All roads lead to his son, tiny and nameless and weak, but alive. Breathing.

He tries to bottle up the horror he feels when he lays eyes on him, again. He tries with everything in him to feel only love, only joy, and yet that sickness creeps in regardless, tainting anything else, rising up and gripping him like a shadow. This was him, his fault. His carelessness. He’s breathing for now, but there’s no telling when that might stop, when this delicate house of cards and wires that is his baby son might collapse.

He wants to run, again. Flee from certain disaster – because it _is_ certain, in some form or other, be it today or tomorrow or years from now. Yet he finds himself anchored there by Annalise’s words. He can’t move a muscle.

 _If he dies._ If he dies, he’ll stay with him until the end. She did it. Now, he has to do it, too.

This is the price he pays for his sins, the universe’s way of restoring equilibrium. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth.

Son for a son.


	2. Your Dry Blood on My Fingertip

He stays with him until morning.

Or at least he thinks it must be morning, if he can trust his own internal clock with any measure of certainty. Time feels arbitrary, irrelevant, like a concept that no longer applies here. The world consists of only him, these four walls, this incubator. His son. No minute hands on clocks ticking down the seconds; no clocks at all, no windows either. Everything seems to be in stasis. A latency period.

Before what, he doesn’t know.

He passed the point of feeling his exhaustion hours ago; now it’s like hunger that’s been left unattended until it can’t be felt anymore, until it creeps through his blood and gnaws away at his insides in silence, his muscles, tendons, breaking him down bit by bit and hollowing him out until he’s nothing but crumbling bone. He’s awake but only capable of the most basic human functions; breathing, blinking, sight, though he wouldn’t see if he had the choice. If he had the choice, he’d choose blindness in a second, to escape, run, hide from this. From what he’s done.

He’s looking at his son. He wants so badly to feel love, joy, but all he can feel again and again is that paralyzing, bone-deep horror – because he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be anywhere fucking near him after what he’d done, accidental or not. He’s bolted down by Annalise’s words, though. He imagines he can still feel her here, looking over his shoulder. A sentinel, watching. He doesn’t get to leave.

It’s a vigil, what he’s doing. Like he’s waiting by his son’s deathbed for the inevitable, even if he’s been stable all night and hasn’t given the doctors any cause for concern. Yet.

 _Yet_. That’s his only concrete measure of time. Anything could happen when the clock strikes _Yet_ , when they cross that line into the unknown.

“Would you like to hold him?”

The voice sounds muffled, like an echo from a million miles away, and it takes a moment for the words to register, for him to realize a nurse has appeared beside him; a different one than before, younger and a good deal more timid. He doesn’t blame her. He knows he looks like a madman, with bloodshot eyes and unwashed clothes, barely budging from his seat all night. If he were her, he probably wouldn’t want to get anywhere near himself either.

He blinks up at her dumbly, doesn’t answer at first. Somehow the possibility that he could hold his son hadn’t even occurred to him; he’d been sure there must be too many wires and tubes to risk moving him – and yet here she is, asking if he wants to hold him.

He does. Doesn’t.

 _Can’t_.

“I-” He swallows, shaking his head, like it’s not a big deal. Like it’s something he can do without. He hasn’t even touched him yet; how the hell does this woman think he’s even remotely prepared to _hold_ him. “Nah, it’s okay.”

“Are you sure? Skin to skin contact for babies in the NICU is important. When they’re in an environment like this, not really used to being out of the womb-”

“No,” he repeats, not particularly loudly, just wearily. Miserably. He swallows, lowering his eyes. “I said… I said no.”

Miserable fucking son of a bitch. Failure of a father. The nurse is looking at him with wide, startled doe-eyes, like she pities him, like she’s terrified of him, _for_ him, because surely she must know the baby’s condition, how weak he is. Maybe she knows something she isn’t telling him. Maybe they all do. Maybe his death certificate is as good as signed already, only waiting for the timestamp.

He can’t hold him. He’s done so much damage already just by occupying the same space as him; who the fuck knows what he’d do if he _held_ him. If he’d snap his little bones like twigs, somehow. Drop him. Suffocate him. Jostle some vital tube loose and initiate a downward spiral no one can reverse. Anything. Everything could go wrong, and the thought of holding him strikes such crippling, irrational fear into Frank as he watches the weak rise and fall of his chest, imagines his tiny lungs gasping for air, withering slowly.

He can’t breathe either, suddenly. He can’t tear his eyes away.

The nurse disappears, apparently having determined it’s best to leave him be, not press the matter, and he doesn’t notice her go. He wonders what she thinks of him, if she’s as certain as he is that he’s a terrible father. He can’t do anything for his son except hold him – that’s the only thing he’s _supposed_ to do, and he can’t, and with every second he fails his son he becomes worse and worse of a father.

And there’s no other way. No alternative. The only way he can protect his son by staying away, and he can’t do that, can’t leave, and so this is his fate, his act of contrition; looking and watching but not touching, like a child at a doll in a store window. He looks so much like a doll, too. Some sickly, skinny, horrific version of a doll. He’s his father. He’s supposed to see nothing but perfection, yet where he’d seen only perfection before, now he sees the horror beneath it; his shriveled, near translucent skin, the veins beneath it. His mangled little body and warped limbs. He’s hideous, all at once.

Suddenly all he can see is a corpse. No rise and fall of his chest. Cold skin. Blue lips. Still and stiff, the way he must have looked when Annalise found him. He was dead, then. He was dead then and he will be again before long.

He may be stupid, a fucking fool. He may not know a lot. But he knows not to hope.

 

~

 

He goes to Laurel.

It’s become an almost robotic routine; up to Laurel, then down to the NICU, rinse and repeat. He feels like a rat in a maze wandering these halls, locked into a course he can’t alter, subject to the whims of some higher power. He isn’t the first, won’t be the last. He’s just one of many faceless souls in this place; a dead man walking in a lucid nightmare, a rat that never leaves this prison until it dies. He feels half-dead already.

She’s out cold, forehead coated in sweat from the fever that’d come on during the night. Infection, they’d told him; a result of the blood transfusion or the delivery, and they don’t expect it to be anything serious but it’s enough to keep her from the NICU, confined to her bed, drifting in and out of semi-consciousness. She’s curled up on her side when he sinks down next to her, shivering, in the midst of what seems to be a fever dream, and Frank feels vaguely like he’s caught in a fever dream too, hallucinating this hell, his dying son and his son’s dying mother. The entire world inside out and upside down and so, so different from the joyous occasion a child’s arrival should be.

He wishes to God he’d never touched her, never picked her for the team, dragged her down to hell with him. He wishes desperately the boy down in that plastic box wasn’t his son at all, wishes he was Wes’s, instead – because then there would be nothing keeping him here, no reason for him to stay in his life, ruin him too. He wishes that, and immediately he feels guilt settle into his stomach as his eyes fall on the sleeping Laurel, face fraught with worry even in slumber.

Like _fuck_ he could leave her. He left her once. Doing it again would kill him – but perhaps this time he won’t get to make the choice. She’ll leave him, first.

They both will. He processes the thought with a numb sort of acceptance. He can’t allow himself anything more.

“Frank?”

Her voice startles him out of his thoughts like an electric jolt, and in his exhaustion he almost jumps, finding Laurel squinting over at him, deathly pale, as weak as he’s ever seen her; even her wrists seem skinnier, more frail, her ID bracelet hanging loose around one of them. She’s soaked in sweat, eyes bleary. He watches as one of her hands creeps down to her stomach, bunching up the fabric of her hospital gown as if to grasp at the emptiness she finds there.

He isn’t sure she’s really seeing him, for a moment, until she croaks out, “Where is he?”

She doesn’t remember. It’s like the first time she’d woken up, only now she’s too weak to scream; there’s nothing in her eyes but silent, mounting terror. Quite possibly she has no idea where the hell _she_ even is, and Frank swallows, his tongue cold and clumsy in his mouth.

“NICU. I – you know that. He’s down in the NICU. I’ve been with him.” He pauses, reaching over out of instinct to grab her hand, fold his over it. “He’s okay, all right? I been stayin’ with him.”

Laurel looks crestfallen, eyes slipping away from him. “I had a dream. He was still inside me. He felt… so strong, you should’ve felt how strong he was. I thought-” A soft sob rattles its way through her. “I thought he was strong.”

“He _is_ ,” he soothes, as calmly as he can manage, doing his best to quell the subtle trembling in his hands, arms, his entire body vibrating with fear. Picture, it occurs to him. He hasn’t gotten a picture for her. She hasn’t even _seen_ their son yet. He’d been so thoughtless, focused only on himself. “’Ey, you know he is. He… he wouldn’t have made it outta there at all if he wasn’t. He’s gonna be okay.”

He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, but what else is he supposed to say. What else is he supposed to _do_.

Silence comes down over them in a way that feels suffocating, like a plastic bag tugged onto his head, slowly filling up with carbon dioxide until the air is hot and heavy and thick and he can’t pull it into his lungs anymore, until he can’t breathe once more. He’s holding her hand, but it feels cold beneath his, distant and unfamiliar, like a corpse’s hand, and when he blinks, he sees, for an instant, the same terrifying vision he’d seen of their son; only this time it’s Laurel’s dead body, alabaster-pale skin, discolored lips, blood soaking the sheets beneath her, and it won’t stop flowing. Won’t _stop_.

Blink. The vision is gone. Laurel is alive, breathing, eyeing him like she wants to speak but can’t muster the strength, can’t do anything but lie there and let the infection scorch through her system. She looks almost catatonic, lost in some place in her mind he can’t follow her to, somewhere deeper. Darker.

“He, uh-” He clears his throat, in an attempt to bring her back, guide her with his voice, like an anchor, a searchlight. Something steady. “He needs a name. We never talked about one. Thought maybe…”

He doesn’t know what he thought. Nor does he have any ideas to offer her, any energy for levity. He doesn’t know what he was going to say at all, and so his mouth falls shut, useless.

“Will they need that?” she asks, calmly. “For the headstone?”

He freezes, every atom of his body going utterly still, skin icing over. If she starts talking like this. If she starts saying things like this, he’s going to fucking lose it and he’s not going to be able to stop himself, but he is, at least, able to bite back the tears that threaten to come as those words leave her lips almost flippantly, too matter-of-factly, so goddamn _calmly_. Discussing the logistics of their son’s death like it’s already occurred.

He can’t handle this. Can’t handle hearing her spit his darkest thoughts at him, bring them to life. Speak them into existence.

“Don’t… don’t talk like that.”

She doesn’t answer. He knows he’s being a hypocrite, telling her not to talk like that when he has, when he’s _thought_ things that are a hundred times worse. He has to give at least the illusion of being strong, somewhat rational. He has to be strong, now, but the fact of the matter is that he _isn’t,_ and Frank sucks in a breath, feeling tears well up behind his eyes, a knot forming in his throat.

“I just… I want you. And him. The three of us. I want our family, I-” He exhales shakily. “I want us to be a family, isn’t that – don’t you want that too?”

Laurel doesn’t answer for a long, long time; so long he’s beginning to doubt if she even intends to answer at all. And when she finally does, there’s still that unnerving, barely lucid air of composure about her, the sudden clarity of a man in his final seconds. Foresight. She’s so certain. She looks, in a way, almost like she pities him.

“Haven’t you learned by now?” she mumbles, words falling from her lips like a damning prophecy. “We don’t get good things.”

 

~

 

Her words follow him down.

Down to hell, back to the NICU, to his own personally-tailored, customized version of perdition. Yet for some reason he finds himself drawn to the hospital’s chapel instead, as close as he can get to heaven. He half suspects he’ll burst into flames the second he sets foot inside, and he wouldn’t fault any god for striking him down. Of all the places for him to go – all the damn places on earth he could haul his sorry ass – he chooses this one.

It’s fittingly dismal. Drab. Not a lot of light, save for the three rows of votive candles toward the back, a dozen little prayers flickering away. There’s a sort of altar at the front of the half dozen rows of pews, a white cloth draped over it and a wooden crucifix hanging on the wall behind it, and nothing else in the way of spiritual imagery, false idols. They are false idols, he thinks; to him, they always have been. He’s never found solace in religion, any holy doctrine.

Really, he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing here. He isn’t going to _pray_ , beg favors from an empty sky. If there were a God, people like him wouldn’t exist. But, it occurs to him, it’s possible God had a direct hand in all this. Doling out divine retribution and such. A balancing of scales.

He’s a sick, sadistic son of a bitch if that’s the case – and more and more, Frank is starting to think that it is.

The pews have kneelers with cushions, and he drops one down with a heavy thump and goes down with it just as hard. He’s never spoken to God; not once in his life, not even while circling in the depths of his madness, locked up in a concrete box with the born-again Christians who’d used to marathon the 700 Club on the TV in the common room relentlessly, like they could somehow retroactively rack up enough Jesus points to redeem for a one-way ticket to those pearly gates. Like fucking arcade tickets at Chuck E. Cheese.

It was a nice delusion, but he’d never bought into it. It’d hit him and bounced off, words like wind. There is no heaven. No hell. Only here and now. Only _this_.

And this… This is hell enough.

Frank doesn’t hear her enter. But somehow, even without a backward glance, he knows she’s there.

“Didn’t know you prayed.”

“I don’t,” Annalise deadpans, that low, acidic drawl. It sounds almost bored, now, though. Like she’s bored of this, of him. “Neither do you.”

“You’re right,” he says, shaking his head, vision blurring. “Better… late than never, huh?”

“What’re you doing down here?” He can’t find his voice, and Annalise gives something of a huff, exasperated. “You being down here begging for forgiveness from a god that doesn’t exist isn’t doing anyone any good. Not Laurel. Not your son.”

He doesn’t know what he’s doing here. Some misguided, childish notion that perhaps, if there is a god, and if that god sees him here, sees him at least _trying_ , he’ll be merciful. It’s stupid. She makes him realize just how stupid it is.

“What…” His voice breaks. He rubs his eyes, feeling how red and raw they are from crying, deep pits forming beneath them. “What do you want from me, Annalise?” _Go away. Get out. Out of my head._

He isn’t sure she’s real. He doesn’t think she is, and he isn’t sure if she ever was – but one way or another, Frank figures, it doesn’t matter. She speaks the truth, and that truth remains the same whether she’s real or whether she’s a figment of his tortured imagination, a ghost haunting him, ensuring he doesn’t stray far from his son. He shouldn’t pray to any god, here; it feels more fitting that he pray to her instead, lay himself down at her feet and beg for mercy like a dog.

He hears her voice, and in a twisted way, it’s like the voice of God. Like God manifesting himself in the form of Annalise Keating.

That, or the Devil.

“I want you to stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself. Blaming yourself. I swear, Frank, I could bash your head against the wall right about now, you’re being so selfish.” He can hear the snarl in her voice, sense her anger as it builds. “I saved that boy’s life. I gave you the chance you took away from me – and now you’re gonna squander it? Waste your time down here pretending to pray, like it’s gonna make a difference? If he’s dying, Frank, he’s dying. Nothing is gonna change that; sure as hell not your prayers, not any god. Not a miracle. He needs his father with him.”

He gulps, swallowing a sob that aches like a stone on the way down. “They asked me if I wanted to hold ‘im, y’know. And I couldn’t. I wanted to, and… I couldn’t, I was so scared-”

“So change that,” she tells him, like it’s that simple, and maybe, he thinks, maybe it is. “Go back up there and hold him while you still have the chance. If you don’t, you’re gonna regret it when all you can hold is his cold, lifeless body.”

It’s a harsh truth, and it cuts its way down his chest, splitting him clean in half, pinning him down like an incest. Annalise has no tact, no filter, her words cutting him like blades, yet he knows, somehow, this is what he needs to hear; she’s only telling him what no one else will tell him. Brutal honesty – and Annalise Keating, whether she be real or imaginary, is nothing if not brutal.

“We don’t get good things,” he echoes Laurel’s words without realizing it. They’re ingrained in his skin, his heart; they’re the only truth that makes sense, anymore. “People like us, we-”

“You have him. Your son. _He’s_ a good thing. No matter how long you have with him, he is a good thing.”

“I’m scared,” he confesses, slumping forward. “I’m just… I’m scared, Annalise.”

“Of course you are. Being a parent? It’s goddamn terrifying.” Her voice sounds softer, all at once. Not kindly or warm, but there’s no longer that razor-sharp edge, that bite in it that makes him flinch. “But the moment your son was born, it stopped being about you. I don’t give a rat’s ass how scared you are; you’re a father, now. You do what you need to do for your son. You don’t get to leave him-”

“I won’t,” he interrupts her, so forcefully he surprises himself. “Leave him. Ever. I just-” He releases a shuddering breath. “I don’t know how to repay you.”

Stupid. Stupid that he’s thinking of repayment now, when he needs to be thinking about so many other things, but his thoughts are fragmented, barely coherent, and he pieces them together as best he can even as they fly in half-hysterical circles, circle the drain. He owes her so much; his life, his everything, the last damn scrap of clothing off his back, every last drop of blood in his body, and yet nothing in the world could ever come close to being enough.

“You wanna know how you repay me? You repay me by being the best father you can be. For however long your son is here; a week or a month or a year,” she tells him. “You _try_. You’ve been given a gift, Frank, don’t you _dare_ waste it. You be the father he deserves. You hold onto him with both hands. You hold on tight and you do not let go.” She pauses. He can hear the tightness in her throat, feel the sorrow heavy in the air; not emanating from any particular source, but so thickly _present_ , almost supernatural. He feels it like a weight on his chest, the weight of her loss. “You love your son. That is how you repay me.”

“Annalise…”

She doesn’t answer. When he turns, the pew behind him is empty.

 

~

 

He’s sitting with him, hours later, when it happens.

He’s taken to alternating between watching him and watching the monitors just to the side of the incubator, tracing the little multicolored sine waves up and down with his eyes, trying to decipher some meaning in them – though they might as well be goddamn hieroglyphics, imagined shapes in ink blots he’s trying to make sense of, madness he can’t find a method to. He watches them, his son’s heart rate and body temperature and pulse and breathing rate, all those things that work together in tandem to keep him alive, half out of fascination, half out of terror. Waiting. Waiting for the moment one of them stops, drops. It can’t hold forever. It’s all so perilous.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

Frank thinks he’s imagining it at first when he can no longer see his chest rising and falling. He’s certain he’s seeing things again, no longer able to trust his eyes or his mind, what visions his mind is making his eyes see, but he blinks and this time, this time it doesn’t disappear. The vision doesn’t correct itself. He isn’t breathing. Isn’t moving. He swear he can see him turning blue right in front of him and he’s frozen with fear, unable to make a sound. Useless.

Then one of the monitors goes off; a thin, ominous beeping, and another joins it – and he shoots to his feet just in time for a pair of nurses to scurry over, one sliding back the incubator to get a closer look at him, the other saying something to her about his breathing, heart rate, AOP, whatever the fuck – something he doesn’t understand, something too complex for his dumb fucking brain. The words blur together into nonsense. They aren’t even words at all.

“He’s not-” he sputters, shaking his head. “He’s not breathing, what-”

The second nurse goes to him. “Sir, we need you to remain calm, all right? Can you do that for me?”

Child. She’s talking to him like he’s a fucking _child_ , and he must growl that at her because she blinks, looks taken aback. She must think he’s insane, wild-eyed and barely able to stand, but there’s a practiced veneer of calm on her face, detachment. And then there’s more; another nurse, a doctor too, he thinks, surrounding his son, a different voice soothing him with a low _We’re going to need you to leave, sir_ , herding him out.

And all the while he watches, watches his world be snatched from under him. Pried from his fingers. He watches, and he’s too stupid and too tired to struggle, scream, demand to stay, to know what’s wrong. They urge him out, rush his son off, and all he can do is stand there dumbly, bones splintering apart beneath his skin, crumbling into dust until he can’t stand, until he goes falling to his knees with nothing to break his fall.

They don’t get good things. He hasn’t learned by now.

He never learns. But sooner or later, sooner rather than later, he’s going to have to.


	3. First Night of Your Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things: 
> 
> 1) Because I'm extra af, I've made a ficmix for this thing, which is [here](https://8tracks.com/aghamora1/contrapasso) if you'd like to take a listen.
> 
> 2) Check out Em's (Catwithamauser) dueling NICU fic [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13008672/chapters/29748009). It's top and we will ofc be doing a poll to see which fic reigns supreme.... jk (but maybe not).
> 
> And as always, enjoy!!

Bonnie finds him. As she has a habit of doing.

He’s slumped in a chair in the waiting room when he feels the brush of someone taking a seat beside him, followed by the pressure of a hand on his shoulder. He has a moment of terror that it’s Annalise, again – real or imagined, a shade there to berate him – but then he feels the movements of a thumb back and forth, a light, tentative attempt at comfort, and he knows it isn’t.

“Hi.”

All the tension inside him uncoils when he hears her voice. He rubs at his eyes, wondering for a second if she’s real – or if she’s a horrifically vivid hallucination too, a new addition to the depths of his insanity. “Hey.”

Bonnie doesn’t look quite like she knows how to deal with him in this state, though she’s seen him at his worst, his lowest of lows, darkest nights, and this is one of the darkest, rivalling all the rest; worse even than the night she had to pry a pistol out of his hands, keep him from blowing his brains all over Annalise’s living room. There’s so much more at stake here than his worthless goddamn life.

“How is he?”

She seems afraid to hear the answer, and Frank exhales, heaving a great sigh that makes his shoulders deflate, crumpling like a balloon emptied of helium. “Stable. He’s… he stopped breathin’. I thought he was-” He can’t bring himself to say the word. “Nurse said it’s just apnea. Where they stop breathin’ for a few seconds. Happens a lot to babies like him.” A pause. “I freaked out. Freaked out bad.”

“I know. I could barely understand you on the phone.”

Phone. He called her. Somehow he’d forgotten completely, but how else would she have known to come; through the forces of the universe. Telepathy. Goddamn osmosis. There are giant craters in his memory, the world around him moving with a nauseating choppiness, like a skipping reel of film, but he manages to focus in on Bonnie somewhat steadily, finding her with her lips pursed, lines of worry patterning her face.

“You need to go home and get some rest, Frank.”

He has an almost visceral reaction to the idea, stomach twisting with panic. “Nah. No, I can’t… I can’t leave ‘em-”

“When was the last time you ate?” He doesn’t answer. Honest to God, he doesn’t know. “Last time you _slept_?”

He rubs his eyes, again, and he’s sure they’re a puffy mess of broken capillaries and bags, as much a mess as the rest of him. He knows she’s right. He’ll be damned if he’s going to admit it.

“Don’t matter.”

“It does-”

“How can I leave ‘em? How d’you – how do you think I can do that?” he croaks. She doesn’t _get_ it, doesn’t understand what this feels like, being a parent with a child that has one tiny foot in the grave already and maybe always will, with him for a father. She _doesn’t_

Only she does. He sees the sadness in her eyes, buried deep but rising to the surface bit by bit.

She was a mother once. Just like he supposes soon he’ll have been a father once, too.

“Frank-” she tries to placate him, but he cuts her off.

“What if somethin’ happens while I’m gone?” he demands, voice gradually losing its strength. He’s so tired. Too tired to yell. So tired he can barely speak, string together vowels and consonants into these slurred, sloshed semblances of words. “And I’m not here. Or if… if it’s Laurel, somethin’ happens with Laurel, I can’t-”

“What if something happens and you’re in the emergency room because you’re dehydrated and haven’t slept in days?” she counters, calm and collected. Rational enough for the both of them. “You’re not going to be able to be there for either of them if that happens. You need to keep your strength up. Michaela can stay with Laurel, go back and forth to see the baby.”

He can’t argue with that. All he has the energy to do is give a weak shrug. “Not like I got a home to go back to anyway.”

He can’t imagine Bonnie wants him back as her houseguest – not after this, after finding out the child Laurel had sworn was another man’s was his all along. She’d been jealous, abandoned by Annalise and scared of being abandoned by him, too, and he doesn’t blame her, but he sees none of that in her now, that jealousy, spite. No anger. There’s just this even, flat look on her face, something like grim acceptance; the look of someone who saw this coming a mile away.

Bonnie rolls her eyes, giving him an anemic smirk. “I’m not throwing you out on your ass when you can hardly feed yourself. Now get up. Come on. The sooner you do this, the sooner you’re back here.”

She sounds like his mother. He wants to laugh as he ambles out the door behind her.

He still needs a fuck of a lot of parenting. In what universe is he supposed to be a parent himself.

 

~

 

Bonnie stops for Chinese on the way back to her place, shoving two takeout cartons of orange chicken and rice into his hands and ignoring his assertions that he isn’t hungry – which he isn’t, not at all, but he chokes it down for the sake of remaining conscious. They don’t say much to each other, and when they arrive at her house she hustles him inside, yanking clean towels out of her linen closet, throwing them his way, and ordering him to shower. Which he does, too, his movements mechanical, his entire body like a malfunctioning machine, a motor running on empty. Running on who the hell even knows what. Not hope.

No, not hope. He won’t allow himself that. But he thinks some has slipped through the cracks anyway, because he hasn’t learned. He never learns.

But his son was dead. Came into this world dead. He should be dead and against all odds, impossibly, improbably, he isn’t. That _means_ something. It must. Frank doesn’t look for deeper meanings in life, never bothers to think things are anything more than what they seem to be on the surface – but that. Annalise saving him, breathing life into his son, giving them both a chance. That means something.

Only after he’s emerged from the bathroom in a t-shirt and sweatpants and found himself standing beside Bonnie’s bed does the idea of sleep seem appealing, his exhaustion slamming into him like a Mack truck out of nowhere. His eyes are dry, the world fuzzy around its edges; he can’t remember when he slept last, and he has only a shaky grasp on time, no idea how long he spent at the hospital, days or weeks. Feels like fucking years. He collapses onto the bed without even bothering to tuck himself under the sheets, and the sleep he sinks into is blessedly dreamless. His brain is so fried it simply boots down, doesn’t torture him further.

It’s a small mercy, considering every second of waking is torture enough.

It’s still light outside when he comes to – darker orange light, he thinks, not morning light, so it must not have been too long – and when he rolls over to check the clock on the nightstand it blinks 4:42 back at him in red LED numbers. Late afternoon. He slept four hours, give or take, got that out of the way. That’s his first thought – and then his second comes, and he’s tearing his way downstairs all at once, frantic, calling out Bonnie’s name as he storms from room to room like a man insane.

If something happened. If something happened, he doesn’t know if she would’ve woken him. If something happened and he was _gone_ , he wasn’t there-

“I’m right here – what is it?”

Bonnie emerges from the kitchen, brow furrowed, and immediately he eases back. He’s known her long enough to read her with no trouble at all, and there’s nothing in her eyes that indicates she’s about to be the bearer of bad news, that something catastrophic has taken place in his absence. A spell of apnea his son never recovered from. Sepsis in Laurel. She’d been fine when he’d left. They both were – not that that means jack shit, when everything can turn on a dime and seems infinitely more likely to do so when he’s not there keeping watch.

“They’re-” His voice simply stops working, words tangling into knots. “Did you hear any-”

“Michaela hasn’t called. She’s been going back and forth between Laurel and the baby,” she consoles, gently. Bonnie has never been particularly expressive, but there’s a softness in her eyes, a certain calmness that flows into him from her, hitting his bloodstream, the first real comfort he’s felt since all this began. “She would’ve called if something had happened. They’re okay.”

Okay. They’re okay. He clings to that word like a drowning man, feeling the earth stabilize beneath his feet.

“Okay,” he echoes, releasing the breath he swears he’s been holding for days; maybe even since he first found out about the baby, months ago. He feels like a child, learning his first word and repeating it ad nauseum. “Okay. O… Okay.”

He stumbles back a bit, grappling for a seat, then slowly lowering himself onto her living room couch, running his hands over his face, over the stubble on his chin he can feel growing thicker, patches of hair thickening on his scalp as well. He feels somewhat more grounded, more human; no longer a walking corpse shambling around the hospital like something out of a goddamn nightmare. He’s a nervous wreck – that’s fine, he can admit that. He really truly has no idea how to _not_ be, ever again.

Bonnie takes a seat in the armchair to his left, regarding him in silence, those gears behind her eyes eternally spinning. Her lips are still pressed into that sour shape, her resting facial expression, and she looks like she wants to say something to lift the burden of this silence but doesn’t quite know how to begin.

“You mad?” he asks suddenly, lifting it for her.

Bonnie blinks. “Mad about what?”

“About him bein’ mine.”

He’s genuinely surprised when she shakes her head. “I’m not mad. Honestly? I’m not even really that surprised.”

Frank huffs a laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We all know how Laurel is when it comes to you.” Bonnie pauses, thinking for a moment, before sighing. “I _was_ mad, at first. But then I thought about Laurel, what she went through. How terrified she must’ve felt waking up without her baby, not knowing where he was. How… that was the way I felt. I realized how stupid I was being.” Another pause, weighty yet brief, full of thought. “There are more important things than us, now. You and Laurel. You have a shot at something good, after everything. A chance to make a life.”

“Yeah, well,” he chokes out, bowing his head to look at his fingers, hangnails picked ragged, bloody. “Not like it’s gonna last long enough to matter.”

“Why do you think that?”

Why does he think that? That’s a question no one has asked him, yet; one he’s not entirely equipped to answer. Why does he think this is all fated to end in disaster, when his son is stable, maybe even slowly improving, and when Laurel is laid up with a fever but otherwise not in any grave danger? Because everything always does. Because it’s a law under which the universe operates. Because of him. Because he’s cursed, blackened soul and bloody hands that destroy everything they touch. Because they don’t get good things, don’t deserve them, and he’s had his world yanked out from underneath him far too many times to let himself believe this time will be any different.

He can’t put any of that into words. So he just hangs his head, until Bonnie sighs again. “Annalise told me what happened, with Connor and the fight. That it might’ve been your fault.”

Fuck, he can’t speak. There’s a concrete lump in this throat he can’t ever hope to swallow, strangling his voice, and he can feel his eyes burn with tears once more, all his sorrow rushing up through them, like craters, cracks in his skin. He feels ready to spill over, rupture into a thousand hysterical pieces of himself. He has no goddamn clue what it is that’s been holding him together.

“It was,” is all he can manage, and Bonnie leans forward, toward him.

“It was an accident. You wouldn’t hurt her, Frank. Or your son. You know you would never do that-”

“Do I?” he laughs, a horrible, twisted sound. “You know what I did to Annalise. That wasn’t on purpose, either. I just-” He pulls in a breath. “I fuck up. I fuck everything up. And I try… I try to not fuck up, and I do anyway.”

“So don’t fuck this up.”

Another mangled parody of a laugh. “Like it’s that easy?”

“Why isn’t it? Look,” her voice takes on a somber edge. It makes him look up, finally, force his eyes to focus on her. “Your son is alive. And Laurel is alive. You almost lost them, maybe, but you didn’t. They’re gonna be okay. Everything that’s happened before now, before this? It doesn’t matter. You have to put that away. Because you can _be_ a good father, Frank. You just won’t let yourself believe it.”

_Because I know I’d be an amazing dad_. His words to Laurel, that night. So full of hope. So naïve. So _fucking stupid_. He’d believed it then, deluded and drunk on a pipe dream as he was.

“Do you?” he rasps. “Believe it?”

“Yeah,” she replies. “I do. But me believing in you isn’t gonna do anything; you’re the one who has to do it for it to make any difference. Shit happens. Life sucks, and it’s terrible. Terrible things happened to us. And we’re terrible people; I’m not gonna pretend we’re not. And maybe we don’t deserve anything good, after everything. But when something good comes along…” She cuts herself off, impassioned. “All I’m saying is you’ve got a shot to make things better. You have a real _chance_ , Frank, you don’t just let that go because you’re scared. You fight for it.” She lowers her voice. “Become someone who does deserve it.”

He wants to argue, tell her that she’s wrong; that there’s no changing who he is, the chemical makeup of his being, all those dysfunctional, fucked-up parts of him. Only they don’t have to be part of him. He can let them go. Put them away.

It sounds like a fucking fallacy. People like him don’t change. But with Bonnie looking at him, telling him she believes in him… He almost, _almost_ believes he could, for a fleeting second.

There’s a very long silence, after that, but this time he feels no need to toss words out into it, dispel it like a cloud; it feels needed, in a way. Instead he lets her words wash over him and burrow beneath his skin, the truth of them. She’s so wise for her years, he thinks, wiser than she should have to be. She looks older than she should, too, like she’s been an old woman for decades, even as a child, all the innocence wrung out of one so young. Weathered like a jagged cliff by loss, shaped by it. He has been, too.

And he has a shot at something better, now. Like hell he can look her in the eyes and tell her he’s not going to take it.

“Now come on,” Bonnie says, suddenly, interrupting his thoughts, and stands. “Let’s go see your son. And before you ask? Yes, I will gladly be his godmother. But no, that kid is not moving in here.”

He laughs, for the first time in God knows how long; he genuinely can’t remember the last time he laughed. It feels like something, the seed of something burrowing in his chest, taking root and spreading throughout him until he burns with the sheer intensity of it.

He won’t call it hope. Though he doesn’t know what else it could be called.

 

~

 

“He looks like you.”

“Think so?” Frank asks, dropping into the chair beside Bonnie and the incubator, where his son rests, eyes open, still only in a diaper that seems far too big for his skinny body and his ID bracelet, encircling his wrist like a miniature version of Laurel’s. He zeroes in on it, for some reason, that link between them. There are so _many_ links between them, similarities he’s found himself noticing without even actively looking. There’s such an immense amount of Laurel in their son it stops his heart, her name printed in Sharpie below him on the incubator. _Baby Boy Castillo_. He is Laurel’s son, completely and utterly.

“Spitting image,” Bonnie remarks, with a wry smile. “All that’s missing is the beard.”

“Yeah, well. Give ‘im time for that one.”

It strikes him that this is the first time he’s regarded the idea of his son having a future as possible at all. He doesn’t know how it happens, what flips the switch inside him – but suddenly he can see it all, clear as day laid out before him. Birthdays and Christmases and kindergarten and learning to ride a bike, tie a shoe. Puppies, scabby knees. Loose teeth. All of it. He sees so much will to live in him, all at once, in those intelligent, bright blue eyes.

His _eyes_. Those he can’t deny. As much as he’d like to believe his son has inherited nothing from him, is totally, one hundred percent Laurel, he can’t shake the realization that he’s staring into his own eyes.

“Think he looks more like Laurel,” he mutters, shrugging off the thought. “Probably for the best. Little of me as possible.”

_Baby Boy Castillo_. His eyes scan the name once more, unconsciously. Not his name. Might not ever be his name, there. He isn’t bothered by that. That’s for the best, too.

“You held him yet?” Bonnie asks, like somehow she knows.

He gulps, lowering his eyes. Ashamed. He’s ashamed, and it burns through his veins like they’re full of gasoline, incinerating him from the inside out. “No.”

“Why not?”

He should. He fucking _knows_ he should. It’s his greatest failure, the one thing he can’t do. Away from this place, it’d been easy to convince himself he could be a father, but the second he set foot here again all those thoughts from before came crashing back in, the anxiety that has stitched itself into his sinews, adhered to his bones. He feels like one hulking, trembling mass of it.

He _scares_ him, this tiny, helpless creature. He’s fucking terrifying.

“I-” His voice catches on something like a hiccup. “I’m scared I’ll hurt him.”

Bonnie doesn’t say anything for a while, turning the words over in her hands, pondering them. Thankfully, she elects not to push it, and instead-

“Give me your hand,” she says decisively, like she’s made up his mind for him.

Before he has the chance to bristle she’s reaching over, taking hold of his hand and guiding it to one of the openings in the plastic dome – and he wants to resist, his mind is screaming bloody goddamn murder at him to pull away before it’s too late, but he lets her. He lets her. Because he’s so tired of trying not to love his son, keep him at a distance. Some dumb fucking defense mechanism, that’s what it is, and when she lets go he finds his hand resting halfway through one of the holes, on the plush yellow bed he’s lying on, soft as a cloud.

He cannot love him if he’s going to survive losing him. He knows that. But he already loves him like he breathes, as natural as any reflex. He couldn’t stop it. Never could have. God knows he’d tried, he’d tried _so hard_ , and yet he finds himself reaching in further, against his instincts to withdraw, clutching the baby’s diminutive hand between two of his fingers, and right then he knows he never stood half a chance.

He does look like Laurel, in so many ways he can’t even count them on both hands. Everything about their son is _Laurel_ , from the curve of his upper lip to the nub of his nose to the otherworldly wisdom in his eyes, like he’s gleaned some fundamental insight into the ways of the universe that no one but him could ever comprehend. Smart. He’s smart, he knows it, and he got that from Laurel, too. _The smart girl_. She always has been.

She gave him this gift. Their son. She’s here with him now, even though she’s not.

The baby curls his hand around his index finger, right then, squeezing with a jerky, probably involuntary movement – and it feels, somehow, as though he’s comforting him. Telling him it’s all right. That _he’s_ all right.

It’s so wrong, all backwards and inside out and irrational, that his nameless baby son should be the one consoling _him_. It beggars belief. But he feels the fragile strength in his grip, and he knows it must be true. Knows he’ll be alright, if not tomorrow or next week then the week after that. Months. Years. However long it takes for him to grow strong.

Because he touches him, and nothing before or after this moment seems to matter at all. He touches him and the world stops, going freeze-frame around him, melting away to a distant drone in the background. He touches him and it feels, somehow, like the blood has been washed clean from his hands, his sins forgiven. It feels like absolution and damnation both at once; damnation to loving him no matter what tomorrow will bring. He’s made it so.

He can feel Bonnie’s eyes on him, and he glances over at her, for a second, to meet them. He can see that same sorrow from before in her, as she watches them together – only now it’s stronger, and she’s making no effort at all to hide it. Jealousy, too; not because of Laurel, but because of his son, because of the child she’d carried and lost before she could ever hold them. He wonders if she’d woken up screaming like Laurel had, clawing at her stomach for the swell that was no longer there, wonders if she’d felt just as empty and cold.

They’ve all lost things. They’ve taken lives and now they’re here watching life begin again in this plastic box, and he doesn’t feel damned, he thinks. His son’s hand tightens around his finger again, his grip like a pulse before it loosens. He’s so alive. So devastatingly alive, his heart monitor like a drumbeat in the background, the most beautiful sound in the world.

He doesn’t know what this is, what _he_ is, if words exist to describe this state of being at all. It’s possible he is damned, damned to love him and damned to lose him, but he’ll take it, come hell or high water. He’s survived hell and high water too many times to count. What’s one more.

Because this. This is higher ground. This isn’t damnation at all.


	4. I See Hope is Here in a Plastic Box

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're at the end, kids! I hope you all have enjoyed this lil look into what I hope 4b will be like, and if you have, drop me a line or kudos below. There's a cheeky lil song link at the very end of the chapter that was just... too perfect of a soundtrack not to share, so forgive me my obnoxious song recs lolol.
> 
> Enjoy!

The day Laurel’s fever breaks is the day they take their son off the ventilator.

Good things come in twos, it seems – even though at first Frank doesn’t believe it, convinces himself this must mean some horrific disaster is barreling its way toward them now even faster, growing ever closer. Too good to be true. It _is_ too good to be true, after the long line of catastrophes that have made up their lives for so long that he can’t remember anything different. But Laurel’s fever breaks, and the same day the doctor removes their son from the ventilator, pronounce him stable enough to breathe on his own. That’s when he knows.

That’s when he realizes there _is_ no disaster coming.

He’s sitting up with Laurel late one night, watching her doze in her bed, deep blue light pouring over her like water, chest rising and falling and her body no longer shivering, that brutal fever no longer raging through her – and all at once, he _knows._ There is no disaster coming, because he sat by his son’s bedside not more than an hour ago and watched him breathe just like he’s watching Laurel breathe now; as smooth as a tide, long, deep pulls in slumber. He watched him breathe, and he knew.

From here, they only heal.

From here, they only get better.

He doesn’t know how he knows. It feels much the same as the way he knew he loved her, the way he knew he loved their son. It’d happened out of nowhere, the notion anchoring itself into his heart and refusing to vacate the premises; not a sudden, palpable rush or a slow trickle, just _there_ one day, as if it had been all along. He could feel it in his bones, in every beat of that heart sending blood pumping through his veins, spreading it throughout his entire body until it occupied all of him. He _knew_ , with such unwavering, intrinsic conviction, and that knowing ran so deep inside him he couldn’t find the source. And he knows this, now, the same way he knew that then.

She’s breathing. Their son is breathing. And last of all, perhaps most inconsequentially, _he’s_ breathing. They came so close this past year to losing that, more than once; the fire and the gun and the elevator, and yet all that feels like a distant, half-remembered nightmare.

All three of them. They’re breathing. Everything else is secondary. Nothing else matters.

He watches Laurel sleep the same way he’s taken to watching their son, burning every single inch of her into his memory, onto the backs of his eyelids, so he sees her image with perfect clarity whenever he closes his eyes. She’s lying on her side, one hand tucked under the thin pillow beneath her head, the other curled around her stomach, as if to cradle something that isn’t there. As if she can connect with their son just by touching the space where he used to reside, nestled beneath her heart. She still hasn’t seen him, but the doctors seem optimistic she can tomorrow. Or if not tomorrow the day after. Because they have a tomorrow – hell, they have a _thousand_ tomorrows. A lifetime of tomorrows. So many he can hardly comprehend it.

He’s lost in his thoughts when she wakes, and at first, in the darkness, he doesn’t notice. It’s only when she gives a soft, sleepy hum and stirs that his thoughts circle back around to earth, and he inches his chair closer, drawn hopelessly into her gravity like a lost, drifting moon, useless hunk of space rock with no real purpose. Searching for a home, thousands of light years spent floating aimlessly in the solar system, until he found her. He found his home when he found her.

She’s difficult to see without much light, but he can see her lips quirk up into a small smile, and he knows she’s come back to him. Knows she’s present. The fever had stolen her away for days, trapped her in her own mind, in her own barely lucid version of hell. Prophesizing feverishly about their son’s death. She’d fed his insanity.

But that, like everything else, doesn’t matter now either

“Good mornin’,” he greets, softly. “Or, well. Not exactly mornin’.”

She hums again, giving her limbs an experimental stretch. “What’re you doing here?”

“Wanted to sit with you for a while,” he says, simply. Because it _is_ simple. He’s spent so much time unnecessarily complicating everything in his head ever since their son came. Finally, he’s remembered things can be simple. “Been with him most of the night.”

The NICU at night is eerie, so silent and still it’s unsettling, rows of those alien pod-like incubators all with their lights dimmed low, nurses moving about soundlessly for the most part, little to no visitors. It feels like another world in a way he can’t describe, and up here the air is lighter. He can move. Breathe easier.

Laurel makes another quiet sound of understanding, and before he can say another word she’s sliding over in bed, patting the spot next to her, where the sheets are rumpled from her body’s imprint.

“You should sleep too. C’mere.”

He hesitates, inexplicably, although there’s nothing he wants more than to be close to her, press himself against her. Feel the reality of her presence, the throb of her pulse, the strength of her. He longs for it with a deep, gnawing hunger he can never satisfy, to fuse his bones with hers, absorb her into him, keep her safe forever.

“Nah, I’m okay.”

“Please,” is all Laurel says. He suspects she knows it’s all she _needs_ to say. “Come here.”

He can’t tell her no. He’ll never be able to tell her no about anything ever again as long as he lives – and now, right this moment, he has no reason to anyway. So Frank pulls off his shoes and creeps gingerly into bed beside her, always wary of getting too close, spooking her, although in a way there feel like there are no boundaries between them anymore, the walls she’d put up these last few months crumbling to dust. There seems to be no reason for them to exist, anymore.

Some of it is Laurel herself; she’s more frightened, clinging to him with a desperation he’s never seen in her, never dreamed he _would_ see. And yet there’s a sort of paradoxical boldness about her too, now, because she’s nearly died twice, and she knows that, and he doesn’t think she wants to waste time on walls or boundaries or careful distances anymore, not when they’ve wasted so much already. When he pulls the sheets over himself and presses in close, she presses in closer, curving herself against him and tucking her face into the hollow of his throat. He brings his hand up without thinking, resting it on the back of her head. When he presses his lips to her forehead – still faintly sticky with sweat, but not nearly as much as it was – he could almost sob from the feeling of her warm skin, the sturdy pounding of her heartbeat. It all washes over him at once, drags him out to sea like a rip tide and holds him there. He drifts in it willingly, as lost as he is found.

He loves her. He loves her so much. Everything she’s given him… He can hardly stand to think about it. He can never thank her for it. He’s so grateful, and undeserving, and he knows he’s undeserving. There’s nothing he can do to change that; nothing except give her all of him, offer up all those worthless broken pieces, whatever they’re worth to her, if they’re worth anything at all.

“How is he?” she asks, moving back to look him in the eyes. He ponders again, dimly, how lucid she seems; how awake and aware and back in her body she is.

“Better. He’s breathin’ on his own. Doin’ real good. Even is a good sleeper. Good at everything. He must get that from you.”

Laurel scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

“I mean it. He gets everything from you, I think. Got your nose. Ears. Mouth. Feet…”

She gives him a look. “Feet are just feet. Don’t think they have genetic similarities.”

“Well he got ‘em from you somehow anyway,” he teases. “Though he got my eyes. But besides that? He’s all you. I look at him and all I _see_ is you.”

He’s showed her pictures, even when she was barely conscious during the height of her fever, barely seeing what was right in front of her eyes. He doesn’t need to tell her these things, he figures, but they comfort him. Like something of a prayer. He says them out loud to remind both of them that he’s there, that he’s alive, even though he isn’t physically _there_. The fact that he isn’t hurts Laurel, he knows; he swears it’s killing her, like she’s missing a part of herself, like her stomach is a wide open, gaping black hole and has been ever since that night.

“They’re gonna let me see him,” she yawns, shifting slightly. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Sure he’s been waitin’. I’m just an opener ‘til the main act arrives.”

It’s a joke, but there’s weight behind the words, anxiety laced throughout them. Laurel notices immediately, furrowing her brow.

“You’re his father,” she reminds him, sleepily but sternly. Her eyes are just barely cracked open, glistening silver through the night. “Don’t act like you’re not important. You are.”

He shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t be his father. Shouldn’t be important to him. He caused all this, one senseless blow, and-

He quells the rising thoughts before they can take hold of him, drag him back into the shadows of his mind that’ve been slowly receding as Laurel and their son have grown stronger, beaten them back. They don’t matter, either. He thinks they’ll always be there in some form or other, like a low hum in the background, playing like a record stuck on repeat somewhere inside him. He’s not going to forget, but he can make himself remember it’s not important, and it _isn’t_ – because what’s important is right here, curled up into his chest, and what’s important is four floors down in an incubator, breathing with his own lungs for the first time. He grounds himself in that, in what’s important. Fuck the rest of it.

“You should go be with him,” Laurel sighs, finally. “He needs you more than me.”

“I know,” he replies, a bit sadly, and for a while that’s all he says, doesn’t make a move to leave. He can’t bear to do that just yet, tear himself away from her when he’s only just gotten her back.

“Can you… can you stay ‘til I’m asleep, though?”

She sounds small and scared, like a child in the dark. She’s afraid to be alone, and she never was, before. Before delivering their son in a pool of blood, alone and terrified, no hand to hold, nothing to do but let that damning red surround her, her own _death_ surround her. He wishes so desperately he’d been there – but he can’t change the past. All he can do is change this moment. All he can do is be with her _now_ and hope, somehow, that that’s enough.

“Yeah, you know it,” he soothes, laying his lips on her forehead again, breathing her into his lungs greedily. “You’re my family.”

A drowsy grin pulls at her lips. “I am, huh?”

“’Course.” He pauses, smirking. “My baby mama, too.”

“Don’t push it.”

He chuckles against her hair, and for a while the stillness of the night washes over them, this peace and quiet. Frank has had so much hellish quiet since their son came, but he hasn’t had any true _peace_. Hell, neither of them have had peace like this in ages, Sam’s death the catalyst that would turn their lives into near-constant chaos. But now everything is quiet behind his eyes, for the first time in ages, and he loses himself in the pounding of her heartbeat, the scent of her hair and her skin and the utter _presence_ of her all around him, almost too much to take. He caresses her cheek with a trembling hand, draws her closer, closer than close. He just wants all of her, to take all of her into him and never let her go.

“I love you.”

He’s sure he must be dreaming the words. Dreaming or hallucinating, or going mad; hearing things instead of seeing them, now. But when he looks down at her and meets her eyes, he finds her looking back with this sort of quiet certainty about her – and this isn’t a dream, he doesn’t have to pinch himself to know that. A week or two ago, before all this, Laurel never would have told him that, opened herself up in this way, but he can see in her eyes that she’s painfully aware of how close she came to dying again without ever having said those words at all, charred half to death in that fire first and then bleeding out in that elevator months later. They have a tomorrow, sure, a million tomorrows, a lifetime’s worth, but they both know there’s so much that can happen between now and tomorrow. They know that all too well.

He smiles, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, amazed by her. He never stops being amazed by her. It’s a continuous process, falling in love with her all over again, in a thousand new and terrifying ways. “You do, huh?”

“Mmm hmm,” she hums affirmation, something like fear bleeding into her eyes when he doesn’t immediately say it back.

Fear that maybe he doesn’t feel the same way, anymore, after everything she’s done to him, said to him, the last time she was in a hospital bed like this. They’ve both taken turns breaking each other’s hearts, but broken bones heal stronger than they were before, he thinks he heard his ma say, once. Broken hearts too, maybe. Broken people.

They’ve healed stronger than they were before. Or at the very least, they’re getting there.

“I love you too.”

He says the words like they’re the easiest thing in the world – and they are, God, they _so_ are. He never dreamed he’d get to be the one saying them back to her, and he was all right with that, he really was. But getting to say them back. Getting to hear them first. That’s everything.

They do get good things. He knows because _this_ thing, right here – this is one of them.

 

~

 

In the morning, he goes back down to the NICU, and for the first time he doesn’t go alone.

Laurel wraps herself in a pastel blue robe after the doctor clears her, protesting the wheelchair the nurses offer before finally acquiescing, not seeing any sense in wasting time – and four floors later he’s wheeling her across the spotless linoleum, to their son. He can’t take his eyes off her; the strong, determined set of her jaw, the way she twists her hands impatiently, the steel in her eyes, plated across her skin like armor. Her hair is unwashed, all unkempt and tangled, bags under her bloodshot eyes, and yet he barely notices any of it at all.

She’s so strong. So beautiful, and so strong, and so _alive_ he can’t take it.

Everything about her demeanor goes melted and soft when she sees the baby, her brows pulling together, shoulders slumping, and there’s this look in her eyes unlike any he’s ever seen before; adoration, the kind so strong it’s stunned her into silence, ripped the words from her tongue and stolen her breath, the way it’d stolen his the first time. When he comes to a stop and she rises, sinking into the chair beside the incubator where he’s spent so many countless hours, everything in the world settles into place, suddenly. Everything feels _right_ , again.

“Oh, my God…” she breathes. He doesn’t think she’s even aware she’s saying anything at all, so transfixed she is. Laurel swallows, leaning in closer, pressing her palm against the glass like he had that first time, too, longing to break down that barrier between them. “Oh… he’s-”

She doesn’t finish the thought. Tears seem to swallow her words, and Frank pulls up another chair beside her, taking a seat, taking his place next to her. This is how it should be, the three of them.

Their little family. Broken and unexpected and accidental – but a good thing, too.

One of the nurses who escorted them down circles around the incubator, reaching inside and withdrawing their son, babbling cheerfully to them. They’ve wrapped him in a polka dot blanket with a knitted cap on his head, and he looks cozy and content, taking in the world with eyes so blue it’s hard for Frank to look into them. He’s still hooked up to a tangle of wires and tubes, yet he looks slightly more baby than robot now, his skin peach-pink, complexion ruddy. He has more hair than he did just last night, Frank swears, a crown of it coming in thick and dark. And he’s small, he’s so small, small enough still to fit in his palms probably – but Frank looks at him, and with all the force of a gale-force wind he’s struck by how utterly _perfect_ he is.

Perfect. Theirs.

The nurse lays him in Laurel’s arms, and she takes hold of him like it’s the most natural thing in the world, desperate to touch him after he was torn from her. Frank wonders how he thought he could ever keep himself from loving their son, how goddamn blind and foolish he was, concerned with himself, his own guilt, conviction that his deeds had damned his son to hell with him. Missing the beauty that was right in front of his eyes. There are more important things than them, now. Bigger things. This is his and Laurel’s entire world cradled in her arms, swaddled up in a blanket, staring up at her much the same way Frank thinks _he_ must staring at her, right then.

Not that he blames him. He’s a grown ass man and sometimes all he can do is stare at her, still.

“Hi,” she greets, breathless. “H-hi.” She shifts the baby up slightly, pressing a kiss to his downy head, clutching him to her like he might be stolen at any second. “I’m your mom. You remember me?”

“’Course he does, you kiddin’? Like he’s gonna forget his ma.”

She isn’t. Isn’t kidding at all. He can see in her eyes that Laurel is equal parts happy and scared shitless, but she summons up a shaky smile, releasing a breath. “Your _ma_. That what I should call myself?”

The baby simply continues staring like he might as well be looking at an angel in all her heavenly glory, smacking his lips together, one stubby fist clenched in his blanket. Frank can’t help but chuckle.

“We’ll take that as a yes, kid.”

There’s silence for a moment, before Laurel licks her lips, letting out something of a sob and a laugh combined. “He’s so… tiny. And he’s-” She sniffs. “He’s…”

She can’t seem to find the word, and so he finds it for her. “Ours.”

Ours. There’s no better word for it. Ours. Theirs. Their own little piece of paradise they’ve carved out for themselves, somehow, amid all the madness. Their own little bit of _good_.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner,” she murmurs, running her fingers over his skin, pausing at one of the snaking wires attached to his chest. She doesn’t say anything, but he can tell it troubles her to see him look so fragile, unprepared even now to be out in the world. Nonetheless, she leans in again, this time kissing his forehead, and he’s tucked so closely against her it’s almost like she wants to hide their son away from the world, where no one can get at him. “I wanted to. But… your dad’s been around at least, huh? Keeping you company?”

“Yeah,” Frank mutters, something like guilt forming a pit in his stomach. “Somethin’ like that.”

“So you weren’t alone, yeah?” she coos. “He was with you. Just hope he didn’t try to sing to you or anything. We don’t wanna traumatize you this early.”

“’ey,” Frank objects. “Two minutes in and you’re already turnin’ him against me?”

“Just your singing. Not you.” Laurel swallows, glancing back down at him with sudden resolve. “I’m never gonna be away from you that long again, okay? I promise.”

She places one hand behind his head, curling it around him delicately, as if scared one wrong move will spell disaster for him. Frank thinks he can see her trembling, faintly, a witness to this being they’re created, this tiny thing that weighs hardly four pounds but has altered the course of their lives irreversibly. Brought them back together. Never in a thousand goddamn years would he have seen this coming, but now that he’s here, living in this moment with her, their son, the unit that is the three of them, he can’t imagine anything else. He doesn’t know why he was so afraid, such a coward, but now-

“You wanna hold him?”

That question. It’s like a bomb going off. That’s all it takes for the world to come crashing back in on him, and he blinks, finding Laurel shifting toward him expectantly, seemingly bewildered why he isn’t making any move to reach out for the baby. He freezes in terror, ice-cold and burning with that same shame from before – because now he’ll be forced to admit it. Admit that he hasn’t even held him yet, when Laurel was away from him and he so desperately needed to _be_ held. His arms feel clumsy. His entire body feels like it’s fallen asleep, useless.

“I, uh-” He clenches his jaw, lowering his eyes. “Don’t know how. I never… have.” _I’m sorry. I couldn’t._

He’s expecting disappointment. Judgement. Maybe a flash of anger. But there’s only understanding in Laurel’s eyes, a warmth that takes root and spreads until simply residing underneath her gaze is enough for him to feel it, too.

She moves closer, undaunted. “It’s easy. Here, just-”

“I’ll hurt him,” he blurts out, before he can help it. Laurel stills, and he shakes his head, shutting down. “I’m scared I’ll hurt him, Laurel, I…”

He leaves the thought dangling. But Laurel doesn’t waver, nor does she back down. He can tell she understands the root of his fear, but she doesn’t mention it because it has no place, here and now. To her, it doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered.

“You won’t,” she assures him gently. “Frank, you won’t. I promise.”

He can feel the anxiety slithering beneath his skin like a hundred centipedes, a million little legs running up his spine. He’d been all right, before this. Good, even. But one mention of holding him brings him right back where he was at the start, square fucking one of self-doubt and self-loathing. He’s suddenly overwhelmingly aware of the power in his hands, the danger in them. He can feel Lila Stangard’s windpipe crumpling in his grasp, as vividly as if he were on the roof of that house again that night, and his stomach sours.

But then there’s Laurel’s hand on his forearm, soft fingers gripping him insistently, that same insistence echoed in her eyes, bringing him back. She isn’t afraid of him. She’s fucking crazy, should be taking their son and moving halfway across the world to get away from him if she had any sense – but she isn’t afraid of him. She isn’t now, and she never has been.

“Hold him,” she coaxes again, and again his reply comes bursting out clumsily, stupidly.

“I can’t.”

“You can.” She’s so patient. So good. Comforting him when he should be the one comforting her. _Believing_ in him, like no one ever has. “Hold him.”

He can hear Annalise now; her scornful words, berating him for all his failings. Shit, for a second he can even _see_ her, but then the visage melts away, leaving only Laurel with her hopeful eyes, her soft words of reassurance.

He holds out his arms.

He feels awkward, ungainly, terrified of this tiny, helpless creature. Afraid of hurting him. He will, he’s sure. He already has. But then Laurel is standing, settling him down into his arms and reminding him to support his head, guiding his arms around the baby, and when he meets his son’s eyes – those blue irises so bright and so _his_ it stops his heart – he realizes he hasn’t.

He hasn’t hurt him. He _won’t_ hurt him. Laurel passes him into his arms, and he’s shaking like a goddamn leaf but he’s got him, encircling his tiny body with his arms like a stronghold. All at once he can’t even see the wires and tubes and monitors; they fade away, like a bad dream after waking. They don’t matter, because there’s color in his skin and a spark in his eyes and breath in his lungs, and he hasn’t hurt him.

To think he was going to run, abandon him. To think he’d thought he ever had anything to run _from_.

He’s as light as a feather in his arms. Incredibly fragile, taking in the world with eyes so fresh and new. The complete antithesis of everything he is. Yet he feels made new, too, in that instant. Cleansed and made perfect, sins forgiven, wiped away. He’s no longer his own, no longer the man he was; the man he was and the things he’s done belong in another life, one that no longer matters either.

“Hey,” he manages, breathless, emotion vibrating through him. He’s still shaking and he can’t stop. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to. “Hey, you.”

This is the beginning of his life. His son was born and he was reborn with him. They both were, him and Laurel – and he doesn’t know if they’ll be good at this, if _he_ will, but he’s going to try. Try with everything in him. His son is worthy of everything in the world, Laurel too, and the only feeble offering he has is himself. And it won’t be perfect, sure as hell won’t be easy. Nothing ever is.

But they have a chance. That’s so much more than he’d ever dreamed they’d have.

Annalise gave him this chance. He’ll never forget that, not for a single waking moment, not for as long as he lives. And when he glances up, eyes drawn to the window across the room facing out into the hallway, there she is, a dark, imposing tower of a woman, hands folded in front of her.

He’s sure she isn’t real. He knows he’s only imagining her, watching over the three of them like a guardian with unmistakable longing in her eyes. A haunting, of sorts. There’s no possible reason she would be here at all, and the sight should unnerve him, make him certain he’s losing his mind, but in a way it’s perversely comforting. Her stare, the memory of her words, be them real or imagined – it all makes him crushingly aware of what he’s been given. Reminds him of the responsibility this is.

Reminds him of the injustice of it all.

It _is_ unjust, that he should get this happy ending and she’s left with nothing. It’s unfair and fucked-up and all wrong, but she hadn’t wanted him to fixate on repaying debts or making reparations, wallowing in guilt. She’d only wanted him to love his son, seize the chance she’d given him. _Try_. And he knows she’s not really watching, some product of his imagination, but suddenly his son feels heavier in his arms, impossibly present and earth-shatteringly alive. He’s infinitely more aware of how lucky he is. The gift he’s been given. The burden he bears to prove she was right to do the giving.

He didn’t have to watch his son die like she’d said. He gets to see him _live_. She’d told him to try, and he will; he has no other choice. He doesn’t want any other choice.

_You be the father he deserves. You hold onto him with both hands. You hold on tight and you do not let go._

Annalise Keating smiles the saddest smile he’s ever seen. And then, like a shadow, she’s gone.

**[FIN.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTR6GWCusEM) **

**Author's Note:**

>  _Contrapasso_ is one of the few rules in Dante’s Inferno. It is the one “law of nature” that applies to hell, stating that for every sinner’s crime there must be an equal and fitting punishment.


End file.
